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The Best Upper Body Workout

Forced reps, dropsets, static holds, and various other bodybuilding techniques all have their place for building muscle. But you shouldn’t place a priority on any of these techniques over simply aiming to increase your strength. If you’ve spent years trying to trick your muscles into new gains with fancy programs that ignored the basics, it’s time you learned how to add weight to the bar.

HOW IT WORKSThe max effort method is probably the most powerful strength-building protocol available, and it’s a mainstay of powerlifters and football players. It’s also very simple to do: Keep adding weight to the bar until you reach the heaviest load you can handle for a given number of reps. After you max out your bench press, you’ll train the rest of the body heavy using exercises that help you to keep driving up your bench press and overall upper-body strength. As your strength increases, so will your muscle gains. And then we’ll revisit those forced reps.

DIRECTIONS Perform the paired exercises (marked “A” and “B”) as supersets. So you’ll do one set of A and then immediately do a set of B, rest, and repeat for the prescribed sets. For the remaining exercises, complete all sets for the move before going on to the next one.